[IAEP] Non-technical Activity Library editors policy

[Sascha Silbe]

On Mon, Nov 30, 2009 at 12:19:31AM +0000, Aleksey Lim wrote:

> There were some threads in mailing lists last time about what 
> activities
> could be approved to be public on Activity Library[1]. Well, some
> of these questions are very arguable, but the worst thing which could 
> be
> is what we have now - lack on any definitions.

Unfortunately your draft is lacking any definition as well:

[1]:
>>   * inappropriate(violent, sexual, subversive content) content
>>   * non-FOSS licence, any restriction for essential(for education, 
>> some people think, essential for other cases too:) behaviour, free to 
>> run|study|redistribute|change

For the latter it's reasonably easy to come up with a definition (e.g. 
all OSI-approved [3] licenses like Sourceforge does or only DFSG-free 
[4,5] licenses like Debian).

The former ("inappropriate content") is unfortunately highly subjective 
and IMO we should stay well clear of letting these considerations 
influence decisions on whether an activity is displayed or not.
I could imagine adding voluntary "content advisory" information like 
IMDB is doing. [6]
If we ever decide to filter the default view (i.e. the one not-logged-in 
users get to see), we should _very_ clearly indicate it's only a subset 
and that the filtered-out ones are not necessarily inappropriate to the 
current user. It should also include easily understable and reproducible 
instructions for removing these restrictions (i.e. creating an account 
and configuring filter rules).

Of course content that is illegal (to all audiences) should be kept out 
of a.sl.o. I'd suggest to take US and EU laws as a basis.
If obliged to do filtering by law (e.g. US), we should base it on IP 
address <-> country mappings.

Just to make my position clear: To me, it's not about whether to provide 
hardcore porn or highly violent content to children [7] (*), but about 
all the other subjective decisions: Is Whack-a-mole [8] / Whack-a-rat 
appropriate? I know many people who would argue on either side. 
Similarly for various degrees of nakedness. And these are just two 
examples, there's an entire universe spanning all the different 
judgements.


> [1] 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Editors/Policy/Non-Technical
> [2] 
> http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Activity_Library/Editors/Policy#Additional_technical_policy_for_editors
[3] http://www.opensource.org/licenses
[4] http://www.debian.org/social_contract#guidelines
[5] http://www.debian.org/intro/free
[6] Warning: Potentially inappropriate: 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0298203/parentalguide
[7] Warning: Potentially inappropriate: 
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0265086/parentalguide
[8] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whack-a-mole
(*) We've watched some similarly violent and frightening war films at 
school, while discussing WW II. But that's a controlled environment.

CU Sascha

-- 
http://sascha.silbe.org/
http://www.infra-silbe.de/
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